A hierarchical-drift diffusion model of the roles of hunger, caloric density and valence in food selection

Abstract

Decisions based on affectively relevant stimuli, such as food items, hardly follow strictly rational rules. Being hungry, the food's caloric density, and the subjective valence attributed to various foods are known factors that modulate food choices. Yet, how these factors relatively and altogether contribute to the food choice process is still unknown. In this study, we showed 16 healthy young adults low-and high-calorie food when hungry or fed, and we asked them to evaluate the valence of each visually-presented food. To compute the relative influence of hunger, caloric density and valence on food choice, we applied a hierarchical drift diffusion model (HDDM). Results indicated that hunger, caloric density and valence affected how fast participants accumulated information in favor of the chosen item over the other. When fed, participants were faster in choosing low-calorie foods and foods with a higher valence. Conversely, when hungry, participants were faster in choosing highcalorie foods, including food items with lower subjective valence. All in all, these findings confirm the complex nature of food choices and the usefulness of nuanced computational models to address the multifaceted nature of decision-making and value assessment processes affecting food selection.

The Hunger Games: Homeostatic State-Dependent Fluctuations in Disinhibition Measured with a Novel Gamified Test Battery

“…Greater hunger during the satiety session led to less cautious decision-making and more errors on the information gathering task. Previous research had suggested that satiety could decrease information gathering, but the potential mechanism remained unclear [11,37]. Our results suggest that lingering hunger sensations after eating promote this impulsive tendency.…”

Proposal for determining valence and arousal thresholds: Compromised pleasure threshold, unpleasure threshold, and arousal threshold

“…On the one hand, there is the advantage of obtaining more reliable responses according to the particular context; on the other hand, it does not eliminate the influence of external variables that interfere in the evocation of the emotions, for example, the time of evaluation, to be satiated or with hunger. In online surveys, controlling the variability resulting from these factors is even more difficult and, according to Garlasco et al (2019), valence and arousal are permeated by satiety and hunger in food choices. Despite these shortcomings, the results evaluated in a laboratory setting and online are equivalent and proven, even with the difference in the control in the experimental conditions (Betella & Verschure, 2016), which leads us to believe that is possible to expand the use of the AS in sensory tasting conditions, providing similar results.…”

“…Decisions based on relatively affective stimuli, such as foods, are strongly influenced by modulators of food choices, such as hunger, caloric density of the food and subjective valence associated with the stimulus (Garlasco, Osimo, Rumiati, & Parma, 2019). Valence (pleasure–unpleasure) is a property of emotional stimuli that plays an important role in the diversity of human emotional experiences (Imbir, Jurkiewicz, Duda‐Goławska, & Żygierewicz, 2019) and, along with the degree of arousal (activation–deactivation), has a prominent effect on the emotional response of consumers (Jaeger et al, 2019; Pinto et al, 2020; Schouteten, Verwaeren, Lagast, Gellynck, & De Steur, 2018).…”

Challenges in the interpretation and therapeutic manipulation of human ingestive microstructure

“…Meal size in humans is determined by innumerable factors related to the consumer, the food and the environment (Figure 1.). Therefore big data analytics, computational decision-making models (26) and correlation estimates of ingestive parameters with clinical and societal factors (70) may be extremely useful in revealing the role of different influencers on the organization of food intake (72,89).…”